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Category Archives: after effects

We made this. Everything was planned out in advance. Instead of letting things happen and running after them, focusing on the fly and all that goodness, we told our actor, the very talented Sam Mignoni, where to stand and what to do. We also used some lighting and bounce. Controlling everything is fun, and I wish I’d had even more control and we’d had another go at the zip line coverage – I’d like a different lens from the ground, but all in all, a strong video. Visually strong, quick, engaging. Go team Nacho and Eileen.

We produced this short motion graphic for the Terra Andina brand of wine from Santa Rita Vinyards. The goal was to capture the youth spirit and energy that South America in order to introduce this new line of wines to the US market.

Eileen was in charge of the After Effects portion of the project, Nacho oversaw the project and wrote the script. Much of the kinetic type was sourced from templates, and the camara movements on the illustrations was done by Eileen. The illustrations were created by Andrea Bascuñan under the direction of Nacho Corbella.

This is something I worked on a couple of weeks ago. It’s the introduction for a presentation for the Department of Communications at the Universidad de los Andes. Nacho’s working on the rest of the presentation. It is a template that I altered to a reasonable degree. At this stage in my After Effects I’m quite certain I couldn’t have built this myself, but the manipulation was incredibly helpful in terms of different things one can and should do when building a graphic presentation with this program.

By the way, After Effects files are huge. Be a little patient when watching. Maybe give it a minute to get itself together. In my next post, I’m going to talk about some of these issues, and how I tried to address them. For now, I have to work. I’m planning a motion graphics piece. (Iep! – My fear of design is well know, but Nacho is working with me on this.)

The song in the client’s presentation is different, but as we didn’t have web rights for that song, I am using the song Ungarom by the group Les Gosses de La Rue on the album Les Gosses de La Rue with a creative commons license. I found this song on the site jamendo.com , a site I use frequently because everything is available under creative commons, it has a wealth of music, and you can purchase many of the songs for license. (Not all, something I unfortunately discovered recently – another topic for another post.)

Santiago’s Metro is expanding. The government opened three new stations (conveniently, days before a tight presidential election) and announced about a week and a half ago that they would begin building an entirely new line, which will connect a heavily working class area of the city with a heavily middle and upper class section.

I was given the assignment of doing a story on someone whose life would change as a result of this new metro line. As the transportation system exists now, those taking public transit take a twenty-minute bus ride to a metro station on an existing line, then taking that metro practically to the other end. One can also take a bus, but the bus follows the same route.

Firstly, Nacho suggested to me that we add a clock to the experience that shows time ticking by. And I agree that’s an awesome idea, and I decided to add a locator map too, that shows the progress. I realize that what’s important is the comparison of time between the current route and the route that will be finished in 2014. So with Jorge Cortés, subeditor of the infographic department at La Tercera, I decide to add another moving map and timer. (Originally I had thought to do an overlay when the actual timer and map stopped.)

The question then becomes how it will look and what program to use. I want that when someone moves the timeline on the scrubber, the map and clock will move correspondingly. I talk with Vicky Martinez, (Infographics and Design at La Tercera) about how this should all be laid out. It’s a lot of elements in a small space, with the true time and map needing to be clearly related to the video, but yet the two maps and clocks needing to be easily visually compared. We look at the Quenching Las Vegas’ Thirst and Climbing Kilimanjaro. Although Vicky has concerns about the quantity of information, I say that the video will not require alsolute attention. I intend to have an interview track, but I say that the video will be far more visual than anything and as the other elements are simple, one should easily be able to glance between them.

Initially, we talk of using Flash. It is what most of their interactive graphics are made in. Myself, I don’t know flash programming well enough to know how one can link all of these elements. If we use separate SWFs for different elements, then I am certain they can be coordinated to start simultaneously, but I’m not certain they will move unified all the time. Putting the video as frames in a SWF would take forever to load, she warns. (this is the way I would know how to do it, but the infographics team is going is planning to put this together for me.)

The final rough mock-up by myself with Vicky's advice.

After some thinking pause time, she suggests After Effects. After Effects is new to the newsroom. Everyone I’ve encountered wants to know it, but I think only a couple have a grasp of it. I have some experience with it. I’ve done two projects with it (the second will be posted sometime this week.

“That should work, right,” she asks.

My mind begins to run possible scenarios. “It should,” I say. “I don’t see any reason why it shouldn’t. I’m almost positive it will.”

And the more I thought about it and the more I dove into the second After Effects project (a presentation for the UAndes Communications Department,) the more I am certain it will.

This is an introduction I made for two videos that were produced by students at the Universidad de los Andes. I did the cut outs with photoshop and I animated them with After Effects. It was my first time working with After Effects. I went through the whole of the Lynda.com training and then dove into this project.

What do I have to say about this work?

To my mind, After Effects has all the good parts of Flash without the horrid movie clip, inside a movie clip, inside a movie clip. Well, it has that, but the setup is far more visual. In terms of editing, I missed my blade tool terribly. I realize it’s not a video editor, but you are still changing lengths, and in After Effects, it’s necessary to constantly drag endings.

Were I to create something like this again, I would try to control the photographic selection better. The photos that I used, from students at Los Andes, and from the people below, worked out perfectly. However, the majority of my time was spent making cutouts and reconstructing the background. It would have been far more effective to put the camera on a tripod, and take multiple images of the same scene, thereby guaranteeing open spaces where people previously were.

A number of the photos I used were from flickr, available under creative commons. All of the links below, except for Selket, were from flickr. I did ask permission of the photographers, and part of the reason I am posting this is to insure that they are happy with the use of their photos. The splash image is a composite from Ken McCown and Selket Guzman, links below.